From One Who Was There

Edward H. Hawkins is my partner, mentor, and office sage. An artist, Merchant Marine, writer, film producer, and business consultant, he provides a unique perspective from one who was there. The one thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history. Sometimes it pays to just listen....


All at once, it's 1936. I'm twelve years old and sitting in my father's insurance office, listening to him and his friends talking about Germany rearming and that fellow, Winston Churchill. A soft voice made husky by mustard gas of World War One says:

"Everyone knows Germany is rearming. Adolph Hitler is building airplanes again"

"What's the matter with the League of Nations? Don't they realize that all this rearmament is against the provisions of the Versailles Treaty?"

"What about the damn Japanese? They're striding down the Malaysian Peninsula like it's their own country! All they want is the oil in Southeast Asia. Everyone knows that."

"Hell! Nobody's gonna do anything about either the Germans or the Japanese. Congress and Roosevelt have got the election to think about this year. They didn't do anything about Italy and Mussolini invading Ethiopia. What makes you think they're going to do anything now?"

"I think we ought to stop Hitler right now before he and the German army gets any stronger. First thing you know, he'll be marching into Belgium and Holland just like the Germans did in 1914."

Voices strong and vibrant to my immature ears. I didn't like what I heard next.

"We don't have to worry none. It'll be Eddie, here, and his friends who'll fight the next war."

I choked slightly on my Mars candy bar and swallowed hard on my sip of RC Cola. I didn't want to think about dying, but I knew the men were right.

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The time changed to 1941. The voices continued. "Damn Japanese. What the hell did they think they was doin' bombing Pearl Harbor?"

"Why didn't we know the Japs were acomin'?" Where was our Naval Intelligence? Those fellas in Washington musta had their heads up their ass!"

"Now, Joe. Roosevelt has been trying to warn us for two years....ever since Hitler invaded France. Nobody listened to him."

"Congress is just as bad. When the Germans were bombing buildings in London, you'd think those peace lovin' shitheads in Congress would of woke up. All they'll do now is hold an investigation and blame some poor general or admiral. Did ja hear Edward R. Murrow on the radio last night broadcastin' from London. It's gettin' fierce over there."

"Is anybody listening?"

"Naw. The French could of stopped the Bache long ago. Wonder why they didn't."

"They're French."

"Nuff said."

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A new voice - Hollandia, New Guinea, South Pacific. From the ship's captain on the bridge to me in the crow's nest lookout tub atop the foremast of the S.S. Gulfwax, oil tanker:

"Hawkins, we're entering the harbor now. Keep a sharp lookout for debris."

"Aye, aye, Sir. Oh, shit."

"What?"

"Captain, there's bodies all over, floating in the water!"

"Of course. We've just secured the island. The marines landed here three days ago."

The water is littered with bodies. Some are bloody, some are partially ripped apart, some are already bloating. Jesus H. Christ.......!

I choke back the vomit. The stomach acid stings my throat. I swallow. I can't lean over the side of the lookout tub and let go the puke. Members of the deck gang are below, already attaching the hoses to the tank valves in preparation for unloading. I crank the intercom to the bridge.

"Captain, there's a big group of bodies dead ahead."

"Can you make out? American or Japanese?"

"Japanese, I think. The uniforms are green."

"Good. We'll plow through them and grind them up in the propeller. Good riddance."

I watch the bodies drift by the sides of the ship and into the stern screw. I shut my eyes, hoping I never dream about this later, knowing full well I certainly will.

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A new voice - North Atlantic - 1943:

"Hard right, Hawkins. Steer 090, due east. The convoy's turning to starboard. There's German subs out there. Look at those Canadian Corvettes go. Must be makin' twenty, thirty knots."

A speaker crackles:

"Periscope, two degrees on the port bow!"

"Hard left, Hawkins. Turn the son-of-bitch! Full ahead. Where the hell are those Corvettes?"

"Oh, shit. Here it comes. Sweet Jesus. It just missed us. Steer it back to 090, Hawkins."

"When this war ends I hope Americans figure out how to recognize evil and evil men and do something about it before it becomes bigger and stronger."

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Different voices. Sitting around in my Welton Street film production office in Denver, drinking Coors - 1950.

"Ed, did you hear. President Truman says North Korea has invaded South Korea. Where's your map. You were in the Pacific in WW Two. Where the hell is Korea?"

"Don't worry. The United Nations will take care of those commies."

"Naw. It'll be American G.I.s that'll take the brunt of this one. You wait and see."

"Where was our intelligence? Why didn't we know about this? What's Congress doing? Who the hell is minding the store in Washington? Are you going to re-activate your commission?"

Wife's voice: "Ed, you're not going back to sea. Let someone else do it. You served your time. Besides, you've got two new movie contracts."

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Sound of sound stage door opening. Voices shouting:

"Kennedy just said that the Soviets have missile bases on Cuba. He's called for a blockade to stop the ships heading toward Cuba. This is it, Hawkins. Nuclear war. Get set."

"What the hell do the Soviets think they're doing?"

"Where was the CIA? Why didn't we know about this sooner?"

"We did. But no one would believe President Kennedy until he showed 'em pictures. Now we have photographs. The missile silos are there."

"Why didn't we take out that commie bastard, Castro, when we had the chance?"

"That's a good way to start a war, dumbo."

"Whatya think this is, chess?"

"Let's all hope so."

Voices, strong, scared.

---------------------------------------------

Other voices - 1965 - "President Johnson says the damn North Vietnamese fired on one of our ships in the Gulf ofTonkin."

"What the hell are those damn kooks thinking of?"

"Where was the CIA? Our so-called 'advisers'. Whose minding the store in Washington?"

"We should have bombed the crap out of those commie kooks when we had the chance. Now, some of the peaceniks in Congress want to negotiate. Where's George Patton when we need him?"

"He's dead."

"Oh, damn!"

-------------------------------------------

Strained voices - 1992 - my office; "Saddam Hussein just invaded Kuwait!"

"Who the hell is Saddam Hussein?"

"Ya know, Iraq."

"You mean Iran."

"Naw, Iraq. The dictator. Just like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. He's killing his own people with chemical weapons."

"What do we care?"

"Oil, mister. Oil. Iraq has the largest army in the Middle East. They can take over Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, and control all the oil."

"So?"

"Ya like freezing to death in the dark, ole buddy?"

"What did Jack Kennedy say about oil: 'Any country that runs on oil, better not run out!'"

"What's President Bush saying?"

"He's going to the United Nations."

"What the hell for?"

"He wants the U.N. to pass a resolution and build a coalition of other countries."

"You're kidding."

"Yeah, seriously. Congress is behind him."

"That's where they always are.....to the rear."

"Well, how did Iraq get away with it. Where was our CIA. Where was our spies. Couldn't we have stopped this Hussein character early on? Who the hell is minding the store in Washington?"

"Are we going to send in troops, bombers, helicopters?

"Guess so."

"It's always us, ain't it?"

"Yeah."

"Where's Harry Truman when we need him."

"He's dead."

"Oh, damn."

----------------------------------------------------

I'm listening intently. I'm hearing voices all over again. Different voices. New words. Frightened words - 2001.

"Turn on the television. A plane just hit one of the World Trade Center towers!"

"A second tower has been hit."

"A plane just flew into the Pentagon!"

"What the hell is happening?"

"They say it's a group called 'Al Qaeda' Ya know, the Taliban from Afghanistan."

"Who the hell are they?"

"Islamic ragheads. The same ones that bombed the Trade Center in 1993. A fella named Osama Bin Laden is the leader."

"What the hell do they think they're doing?"

"They don't like us."

"Obviously."

"What does the President say?"

"He says we're gonna get 'em."

"Where was the CIA? Where was our intelligence? Who's minding the store in Washington?"

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A different, quieter voice - 2002.

"The President says that Saddam Hussein will have a nuclear bomb in a few months and that he already has biological weapons."

"I thought the U.N. took care of this character when we wupped his ass in 1993. Signed a
treaty that made him give up his weapons."

"Yep. That's what we did. Put in weapon inspectors and all"

"What happened."

"The U.N. didn't follow through. Hussein tossed out the inspectors on their butts."

"What's the President gonna do?"

"He wants to go kill the bastard."

"Good for him. What's stopping him?"

"Some members of Congress want him to go get approval from the U.N."

"What the hell for?"

"They think it's the proper, legal thing to do."

"Legal, smegal. They could kill us all in the meantime. Where is George Patton when we need him?"

"He's dead."

"Still dead, huh?"

"We will be too, if we just sit and do nuttin."

"Yeah. It's a real problem, ain't it."

"Are we going to go get him or wait 'til he comes to us."

"I dunno. It's up to Congress and the President."

"There's a pair to draw to......."

"...And the U.N."

"Ah, the Joker in the game."

"Yeah. And it's still a problem, ain't it!"

"Well, the President warned us. Think we'll listen this time?"

"Hell no. No more'n than the Brits listened to Churchill, or we listened to Roosevelt or Kennedy or.....Truman or Reagan or Bush One." Sigh.

"Where's Winston Churchill when we need him."

"He's dead"

"Still dead, huh?."

"Yeah."

"Jack Kennedy?"

"He's dead, too."

"George Washington?"

"Yeah. Him too."

"Elvis......?"

"Yeah.......I think so."

"Ain't we got any leaders left?"

"Michael Jackson......."

"Oh, damn."

"How about Dubya, the Prez? What's he say?"

"He said: 'If Iraq gains even greater destructive power, nations in the Middle East would
face blackmail, intimidation, or attack. Chaos in that region would be felt in Europe and beyond....Those who choose to live in denial may eventually be forced to live in fear'."

"Think anybody will listen to him?"

"Nope. Nobody listened to those other guys either when they warned about evil threats from evil men."

"Well, Dubya ain't no Churchill!"

"Can you be sure? Do you want to take the chance?"

"Naw. Guess not."

"Think there'll be protesters in the streets?"

"Oh, hell, yes. Aren't there always?"

"Protesters never won a war."

"Yeah, they don't fight and die either."

"Of course. That's the idea of protestin'. Ya don't have ta die."

"You know what Gen. Patton said....."

"Yeah, yeah. I remember.....make the other poor bastard die fer his country."

"Where's Patton when we need him to kick the asses of the protesters?"

"He's dead."

"Still dead, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Shit."

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The voices recede. I'm driving home in my car thinking about 1936 and my father's friends. I turn on the radio. It's election time. Voices advise me to call some darn politician and tell him to quit ruining Social Security, to quit lying, to tell the truth, to quit taking money from special interests......

I'm frustrated. I switch to the CD player. A remastered CD of the voice of a 1960's ballad singer comes through the speaker:

"When will they ever learn; when will they.....ever learn.
The answer, my friend, is blowin’in the wind.
The answer is blowin’ in the wind."

I turn the corner leading to my house. The voices of the past echo in my 78 year-old ears, clogged with the earwax of disgust.

"The answer is blowin’ in the wind."

---------------------------------------------

New voices. Angry voices. Political voices. 2004. Election Year. I'm having a drink at my favorite bar. A voice from the left chimes in.

"Have you heard about that new dirty book claiming that John Kerry was lying about his Vietnam experiences? Jes', what a slam book. Bunch of lies."

"What book?" a voice down the bar on the right chirps up.

"It's called 'Unfit For Command. - Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.' It
proves that Kerry was lying about his medals, ya know....Purple Hearts, Silver Star and Bronze Star."

"Proof, shit. It's a slam book, a dirty political book!"

The voice from the left down the bar was vehement. "Oh, like "Fahrenheit 9-11". The slam book and movie about Bush and how he lied."

"It ain't the same. Bush was lyin'. Kerry was telling the truth."

"How about the 250 Vietnam Swift Boat vets that were in the same place as Kerry. All of them aren't lying. And one of 'em is an admiral. Get real."

"Aw, they're all just being run by the Republican National Committee and Bush's cronies."

"All Bush supporters, huh?"

"Yep. Bought and paid for by Bush."

"And that fat-ass movie author, Michael Moore, and that toilet mouth, Oprah Winfrey, are not bought and paid for by Kerry's cronies."

"Naw. They're all independent. Kerry doesn't have any control over them."

"Horse shit. Where you been hiding? And all them Vietnam vets are controlled by Bush?"

"Sure. And Bush ought to tell them guys to stop those lying dirty television ads"

"What about the past six months of lying dirty television political ads about Bush up to the Democrat convention."

"Those were the truth."

"And the 250 vets aren't tellin' the truth?"

"Naw. They're lying through their teeth. They're all Bush supporters."

"And Kerry's swift boat guys, Michael Moore and Oprah and all them Hollywood queer-eyes aren't Kerry supporters?"

"Yeah. But it's a free country. First amendment says they can say whatever they please."

"But, let me get this straight...the 250 Vietnam vets can't say whatever they want to."

"Sure they can say it, even if they are lies."

"You must be a democrat."

"Sure I am. What'd think I was, a Socialist?"

"It crossed my mind. Have another beer. I'm buyin'. How about a Coors?"

"I don't drink fascist beer."

"Okay, how about a Heineken?"

"That's better."

"From Socialist Holland."

"You're buyin'. Pay the lady."

"Okay. But Bush is gonna win."

"Like hell. Kerry's gonna win."

"Good thing you're wearing flip-flop sandals. Kerry would be proud. Bush was right about the war, though."

"Shit."

"He's doing the same thing Gen. Patton would have done."

"Patton's dead."

"Still dead, huh."

"Eisenhower?"

"He's dead, too."

"Well, how about Truman and Korea. We still have soldiers on the DMZ and North Korea is threatening nuclear weapons."

"Shut up and drink."

The sound of bottles clinking echoed as I walked out. Funny thing. I got in my car, turned on the radio to my favorite folk music station and the music of the old Kingston Trio came through the speaker,

"The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.....the answer is blowin' in the wind."

War, Iraq, Iran, London, Moscow, Washington, the cold North Atlantic ocean and the hot, miserable South Pacific jungle rot seemed far away. Politics had quieted. The voices had softened and poor old Charley was still trying to get off the MTA.

Tomorrow is my 80th birthday. Thank God for something that makes sense.

Ed Hawkins - August 19, 2004.

© 2004 Edward H. Hawkins

P.S. I WROTE THIS A YEAR AGO, AND SATURDAY IS MY 81ST BIRTHDAY. FUNNY THING......WE'RE STILL IN IRAQ. IRAN'S GOING NUKULAR. SO'S N. KOREA. CONGRESS IS STILL FUKIN AROUND WITH THAR THUMB UP THAR BEHIND. THE POPULACE IS STILL BEATIN UP THE PREZ. DEMOS AND REPUBS ARE BEATIN UP EACH OTHER. LIBERTARIANS ARE LAFFIN THAR ASS OFF. AIN'T NUTHIN CHANGED IN A WHOLE GODDAM YEAR!

What'd ya think I'm going to be writing here in 2006? I'll copy ya then. Bye.

Ed Hawkins - August 18, 2005

© 2005 (renewed) Edward H. Hawkins

Let's See....Who's Next?

Reported under Conspiracy Theory at al Jazeera web site...

The U.S. Vice President has instructed the Air Force to start putting plans for an air strike on Iran's nuclear sites using the excuse of the next “terrorist attack”, according to CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi, now a partner in Cannistraro Associates.

"In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran. The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing – that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack – but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections."

So Philip Giraldi is raising concerns that Mr. Cheney and the neocons, the same men who used 9/11 as their excuse to attack Iraq, are pushing for another war against Iran, using the excuse of another “terrorist” attack.

Why would Iran attack the U.S. when they have been doing everything possible to avoid a war that would absolutely devastate their country? But the U.S. government is following the same script as with Iraq: ‘This Axis of Evil member has ties to “terrorism” and a nuclear weapons program, the UN won't act, so we have to attack them from the air, if not invade them to plant the flag of “liberty and democracy”’.

Again, there’s a convergence of interests between those who have a long-term energy strategy and those whose primary objective is protecting Israel.

Giraldi confirmed information about Air Force Intelligence currently in Qatar picking targets. He said that the Special Forces were also already in Iran hunting for "suspected sites."

Last April, former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote an article saying that Air Force officers had told him that they were working on plans for war against Iran, that are supposed to be ready by June of this year.

Ritter also stated that the invasion will come from U.S. bases in Azerbaijan, and that the U.S. is already flying drones in Iranian airspace. He writes: "Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.
"As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool's dream."

Invading Iran through Iraq would be impossible, as Iraq’s Shiites would finally be unleashed against U.S. forces, who would then have to fight from both front and rear. Also a general Shiite uprising in Iraq would be a likely result of bombing Iran.

If the U.S. attacked the Bushehr reactor, not only would radioactive particles blast into the air and fall back down to earth and cause great harm to the environment, but numerous Russians would also be killed.

How is the U.S. going to react if the Russians in retaliation bombed a reactor full of Americans in, say, India?

Ooops...something else we forgot to think about

"On Sept. 9, 2002, with U.S. bases being readied in Kuwait, Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei summoned his war council in Tehran. According to Iranian sources, the Supreme National Security Council concluded, "It is necessary to adopt an active policy in order to prevent long-term and short-term dangers to Iran."...

Before the March 2003 invasion, military sources say, elements of up to 46 Iranian infantry and missile brigades moved to buttress the border. Positioned among them were units of the Badr Corps, formed in the 1980s as the armed wing of the Iraqi Shi'ite group known by its acronym SCIRI, now the most powerful party in Iraq. Divided into northern, central and southern axes, Badr's mission was to pour into Iraq in the chaos of the invasion to seize towns and government offices, filling the vacuum left by the collapse of Saddam's regime. As many as 12,000 armed men, along with Iranian intelligence officers, swarmed into Iraq.

The story is about the growing presence and influence of Islamist Iran, in defeating both the US and the secular society of Iraq. Iran infiltrated early and often. Time says it has documents showing that Iran paid the salaries of "at least 11,740 members of the Badr Corps" last year, and probably still has them on the payroll. The Iranian plan didn't just cover military issues: "Businesses, front companies, religious groups, NGOs and aid for schools and universities are all part of the mix." And the Iranians are still working hard at winning this war. Time reports that they're bringing in more sophisticated weapons, more trained insurgents, and more theocratic policies."

The "Beat" Goes On....

An Egyptian school teacher about to be released after being held for 3 1/2 years as a detainee (prisoner) describes his treatment and why he can't walk.

Focusing Our Outrage

You may already know that Arianna Huffington has a blog with about 200 regular contributors. You may also want to consider signing up for her weekly email news. This one is dynamite, and there’s much more.

Cindy Sheehan Steps Into the Leadership Void
Posted August 11, 2005 at 5:00 p.m. EDT

During my many years as a writer, I've interviewed hundreds of people. But talking with Cindy Sheehan this morning was unlike any conversation I've ever had. Even though we were talking via cell phone -- and had a crummy, staticky connection at that -- her authenticity and passion reached through the receiver and both touched my heart and punched me in the gut.

She spoke with a combination of utter determination, unassailable integrity, fearlessness, and the peace of someone who knows that their cause is just. Her commitment was palpable -- and infectious. It reminded me an old quote about the great Greek orators: "When Pericles spoke, the people said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march!'"

That's the feeling I got from this former Catholic youth minister. She of the floppy hat and the six foot frame (though she's standing even taller than that these days). A woman driven by faith and conviction who used to think that one person couldn't make a difference and is learning otherwise. Her humanity stands in stark contrast to the inhumanity of those who refuse to admit their mistakes and continue to send our young men and women to die in Iraq.

She may not be the kind of media figure the cable news channels would order up from newsmaker central, a la Natalee Holloway. But she is the kind of unexpected leader I've been writing about for years. One who springs not from the corridors of power, but from among the people. One who may come from Vacaville, California, but who makes nonsense of red state/blue state distinctions.

The time has passed when we can stand around waiting for a knight on a white horse to ride to our rescue. We've got to look to ourselves -- to the leader in the mirror. Our elected officials have woefully failed to provide the leadership needed on this most vital issue of our time. And stepping into that void is Cindy Sheehan. Inspiring us. Touching our conscience. Calling forth our courage and our commitment. Focusing our outrage. And acting as a catalyst for the tens of millions of Americans who know that the war in Iraq is a disgrace.

Who knows, her example might even be just the thing to give Hillary and Harry and the rest of the Democratic leaders the spine transplant they so desperately need. But don't hold your breath. Instead, use it to show your support for Cindy Sheehan -- and for our troops.”

Dennis Hastert to Win "Spiro Agnew" Award

Announcement coming soon....

Hastert Shares Pork Pie

I'm Not Making This Up

Voodoo Man

This sounds like it should be in the Onion, but nooooo, this is our new reality.

"Pentagon to host 9/11 march, show

BY MICHAEL McAULIFF

DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon will hold a massive march and country music concert to mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an unusual announcement tucked into an Iraq war briefing yesterday.

"This year the Department of Defense will initiate an America Supports You Freedom Walk," Rumsfeld said, adding that the march would remind people of "the sacrifices of this generation and of each previous generation."

The march will start at the Pentagon, where nearly 200 people died on 9/11, and end at the National Mall with a show by country star Clint Black.

Word of the event startled some observers. "I've never heard of such a thing," said John Pike, who has been a defense analyst in Washington for 25 years and runs GlobalSecurity.org.

The news also reignited debate and anger over linking Sept. 11 with the war in Iraq.

"That piece of it is disturbing since we all know now there was no connection," said Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq veteran who heads Operation Truth, an anti-administration military booster.
Rieckhoff suggested the event was an ill-conceived publicity stunt. "I think it's clear that their public opinion polls are in the toilet," he said.

Rumsfeld's walk had some relatives of 9/11 victims fuming.

"How about telling Mr. Rumsfeld to leave the memories of Sept. 11 victims to the families?" said Monica Gabrielle, who lost her husband in the attacks.

Administration supporters insisted Rumsfeld was right to link Iraq and 9/11, and hold the rally.

"We are at war," said Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.). "It's essential that we support our troops."
He also said attacking Iraq was necessary after 9/11. "You do not defeat Al Qaeda until you stabilize the Middle East, and that's not possible as long as Saddam Hussein is in power."

Originally published on August 10, 2005

(Not-so) Depleted Uranium

However, Charlie Anderson, another Iraq veteran, had strong words for Bush. After discussing how the background radiation in Baghdad is now five times the normal rate-the equivalent of having 3 chest x-rays an hour, he said, "These are not accidents-the DU [Depleted Uraniaum]-it's important for people to understand this-the use of DU and its effects are by design. These are very carefully engineered and orchestrated incidents."

Click title for entire article.

Truth Leaks

Years after the fact we sometimes learn the truth:

- Hitler was a methamphetamine addict
- Kennedy got daily injections from Dr. Feelgood
- Nixon was an alcoholic
- Reagan's brain was filling up with plaque on its own
- Bush, the First, puked on the lap of the Prime Minister of Japan and said to Barbara "Don't let me go out when I'm this drunk".

During the 2000 debates, I noticed that Bush II was constantly chewing on his inner lip. In 2004 this had turned into a tooth-grinding jaw movement. These subtle hints made me wonder if he was reverting back to his cocaine days or just nervous. The truth leaks out slowly.

Bush Taking Anti-Depressants to Control Mood Swings

By CHB Staff
Jul 28, 2004, 06:13

President George W. Bush is taking anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.

The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”

Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.

“Keep those motherfuckers away from me,” he screamed at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”

Bush’s mental stability has become the topic of Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill Blue first reported on June 4 about increasing concern among White House aides over the President’s wide mood swings and obscene outbursts.

Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad” showcase Bush’s instabilities.

“I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed,” Dr. Frank said. “He fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated.”

Dr. Frank’s conclusions have been praised by other prominent psychiatrists, including Dr. James Grotstein, Professor at UCLA Medical Center, and Dr. Irvin Yalom, MD, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University Medical School.

The doctors also worry about the wisdom of giving powerful anti-depressant drugs to a person with a history of chemical dependency. Bush is an admitted alcoholic, although he never sought treatment in a formal program, and stories about his cocaine use as a younger man haunted his campaigns for Texas governor and his first campaign for President.

“President Bush is an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies,” Dr. Frank adds.

The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment on this article.

The exact drugs Bush takes to control his depression and behavior are not known. While Col. Tubb regularly releases a synopsis of the President’s annual physical, details of the President’s health and any drugs or treatment he may receive are not public record and are guarded zealously by the secretive cadre of aides that surround the President.

Veteran White House watchers say the ability to control information about Bush’s health, either physical or mental, is similar to Ronald Reagan’s second term when aides managed to conceal the President’s increasing memory lapses that signaled the onslaught of Alzheimer’s Disease.
It also brings back memories of Richard Nixon’s final days when the soon-to-resign President wandered the halls and talked to portraits of former Presidents. The stories didn’t emerge until after Nixon left office.

One long-time GOP political consultant who – for obvious reasons – asked not to be identified said he is advising his Republican Congressional candidates to keep their distance from Bush.
“We have to face the very real possibility that the President of the United States is loony tunes,” he says sadly. “That’s not good for my candidates, it’s not good for the party and it’s certainly not good for the country.”

KIA Soldier's Mom to Confront Bush in Crawford

Cindy Sheehan, Co-Founder of Gold Star Families for Peace, and mother of a soldier killed in action in Iraq, plans to confront President Bush with questions at his Crawford ranch on Saturday morning, August 6, 11 a.m. CT.

Accompanying Sheehan will be members of Veteran's for Peace (VFP), Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), CODE PINK, and Crawford Peace House, all members or allies of the AfterDowningStreet.org Coalition.

On Wednesday, Bush said (speaking about the dreadful loss of life in Iraq in August): "We have to honor the sacrifices of the fallen by completing the mission." and "The families of the fallen can be assured that they died for a noble cause."

In response, Sheehan wrote:"We want our loved ones' sacrifices to be honored by bringing our nation's sons and daughters home from the travesty that is Iraq IMMEDIATELY, since this war is based on horrendous lies and deceptions. Just because our children are dead, why would we want any more families to suffer the same pain and devastation that we are? We would like for him to explain this 'noble cause' to us, and plan to ask him why Jenna and Barbara are not in harm's way, if the cause is so noble. If he is not ready to send the twins, then he should bring our troops home immediately. We will demand a speedy withdrawal."

Sheehan said today that she plans to stay "until we are arrested or satisfied with the answers."

Click on title to continue ...

Tech Note: Gizmo vs Skype

A few weeks back I recommended that you try Skype, a VOIP “softphone” that enables you to make free long distance telephone calls to anyone else who has the program. Now that I’ve tried Gizmo, another similar free product, I’m afraid I’m going to have to change my recommendation.

Gizmo is better than Skype. Gizmo seems to be second generation. The interface is smoother, the feature set is larger (includes built in recorder), and, best of all, the quality of the phone call itself is better. Check it out at http://www.gizmoproject.com/.

Tech Note:"We are the Web" - Wired Magazine

I bought my first computer in 1979, and having come from 10 years of study of and research in how the human brain works, I’ve been dreaming of the global computer brain. In my fantasy, one day in the future all of our screens would report that a singularity had occurred and that our global brain had started thinking. Maybe it already has...

This article is the best I’ve read that examines these concepts.

"Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches. Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed "chip" spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of transistors in one PC.

This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion "synapses" between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is.

Since each of its "transistors" is itself a personal computer with a billion transistors running lower functions, the Machine is fractal. In total, it harnesses a quintillion transistors, expanding its complexity beyond that of a biological brain. It has already surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. For this reason some researchers pursuing artificial intelligence have switched their bets to the Net as the computer most likely to think first. Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI "that would be proud of me," has invented massively parallel supercomputers in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer like IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast digital tangle of the global Machine.

In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing."

Religion itself is the fount of most evil

"Everyone is being blamed, from the obvious villainous duo of George W Bush and Tony Blair, to the inaction of Muslim “communities”. But it has never been clearer that there is only one place to lay the blame and it has ever been thus. The cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is of course religion itself, and if it seems ludicrous to have to state such an obvious reality, the fact is that the government and the media are doing a pretty good job of pretending that it isn’t so.

Bush’s fundamentalist Christian insanity seems temporarily forgotten, and there is much talk of moderate Islam as if this is a jolly good thing, when in fact, in tandem with all other world religions, very much including Bush’s, it is a Dark Ages nonsense that should, of course, be tolerated and its adherents protected and permitted to practice it peacefully, but falls a very long way from meriting respect. The age of enlightenment freed reasoning humans from the shackles of crudely hewn anthropomorphic gods, leaving these man-made deities to serve those who wished to keep them alive for the purposes of comforting self-delusion, social control – particularly the control of women – and the validation of power, violence and aggression."

Let the Reframing Begin

Remember when you first heard the phrase “weapons of mass destruction”, and then WMD? I can’t remember exactly when it was either, but when I first heard it I felt it was a clever “framing” which would eventually lead to deception. What followed was a series of lies relating to these WMD which were used to rationalize an elective war.

When the phrase “War on Terror” got started, I thought it was just another American “War on X”. Poverty, Drugs, etc. Everyone should have known you can’t have a war on a tactic. But Bush insisted. And now the reframing has begun. I wonder why?

WASHINGTON, July 25 - The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.

In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation's senior military officer have spoken of "a global struggle against violent extremism" rather than "the global war on terror," which had been the catchphrase of choice.

Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution." He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that "terror is the method they use."

Although the military is heavily engaged in the mission now, he said, future efforts require "all instruments of our national power, all instruments of the international communities' national power." The solution is "more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military," he concluded.

Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Rumsfeld spoke in the new terms on Friday when he addressed an audience in Annapolis, Md., for the retirement ceremony of Adm. Vern Clark as chief of naval operations. Mr. Rumsfeld described America's efforts as it "wages the global struggle against the enemies of freedom, the enemies of civilization."

The shifting language is one of the most public changes in the administration's strategy to battle Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and it tracks closely with Mr. Bush's recent speeches emphasizing freedom, democracy and the worldwide clash of ideas.

"It is more than just a military war on terror," Steven J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in a telephone interview. "It's broader than that. It's a global struggle against extremism. We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative."

Could it be because you can lose a war? but a "struggle" goes on and on....

Pants on Fire

From the Ironic Times

honesty

The Crookeder Crook

Nixon was a small-minded man with a complex of problems that lead him to criminal behavior and his downfall. Nixon was a crook.

Bush is a small-minded man with a complex of problems that lead him to self-destructive behavior, but he wants to bring us along with him. Bush is a sociopath, and much more dangerous.

As usual, the Daily Kos nails it.

"There is no ethic, law, decency or national interest that trumps the political fortunes and powers of the GOP in Rove World. Indeed, in that sense, this is the most corrupt Administration since Nixon. Unfortunately, unlike the Nixon Administration, it appears that there is and was not one competent official involved in GOVERNING rather than politics in the Bush Administration. This combination of incompetence and lack of respect for law, ethic, truth and decency has proven a disastrous combination, leading to the worst administration in American history. And I say this without hyperbole."

Bush is going down! (or am I dreaming?)

Leave Rove Alone

Many are calling for the resignation or firing of Karl Rove. I say we leave him alone as he is one of the keystones of the Bush administration and will bring the whole sordid mess down when he is indicted. Fitzpatrick, the Special Prosecutor, is carefully building a case much larger the Valerie Plame outing. His findings will reveal the entire story of how we were lied to in order to convince us that the war in Iraq was necessary. As Andrea Mitchell said this morning on the Imus show, “how do you spell impeachment?”

Whose Last Throes?

Allawi: this is the start of civil war

Hala Jaber, Amman

IRAQ’S former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has warned that his country is facing civil war and has predicted dire consequences for Europe and America as well as the Middle East if the crisis is not resolved.

“The problem is that the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq,” said Allawi, a long-time ally of Washington.

In an interview with The Sunday Times last week as he visited Amman, the Jordanian capital, he said: “The policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak.”

Bali

Updated: 8:38 p.m. ET July 9, 2005
Associated Press

New York and Washington. Bali, Riyadh, Istanbul, Madrid. And now London.
When will it end? Where will it all lead?

The experts aren’t encouraged. One prominent terrorism researcher sees the prospect of “endless” war. Adds the man who tracked Osama bin Laden for the CIA, “I don’t think it’s even started yet.”

An Associated Press survey of longtime students of international terrorism finds them ever more convinced, in the aftermath of London’s bloody Thursday, that the world has entered a long siege in a new kind of war. They believe that al-Qaida is mutating into a global insurgency, a possible prototype for other 21st-century movements, technologically astute, almost leaderless. And the way out is far from clear.

In fact, says Michael Scheuer, the ex-CIA analyst, rather than move toward solutions, the United States took a big step backward by invading Iraq.

The Mogambo Guru

You've got to read this guy for straight up analysis presented in a humorous style. Go Mogambo!

The Puke Point
by The Mogambo Guru
June 28, 2005


-I am in full lock-down mode here at the Mogambo Bunker, and I gotta tell ya that I look pretty sharp in my camouflage Speedo and these bandoliers of ammo across my chest. The reason that I am so frantic is that the growth in Total Fed Credit has gone to zero for over a month now. This is, for me, the ultimate in bad news.

The lack of growth in Fed Credit is bad news because, as Peter Zihlmann of P. Zihlmann Investments explains, "The present expansion is the longest running expansion on record. It has surpassed all other economic expansions before it. The driving force behind it is the rapid growth of the money supply and the explosion of credit that has accompanied it." Many people are saying that the money supply is anemic, too, but that is not exactly true. In fact, M3 has accelerated over the last month above its trend for the last few years, although the monetary base has pretty much leveled off.

And later…

And if that wasn't enough, in the last week foreigners have suddenly stopped buying our debt through their accounts at the Fed. And the banks have suddenly divested themselves of $74 billion in government debt. In one week! One! And the banks got rid of another $11.5 billion in "other securities", to boot!

And further on…

And so the people are upset? Hahahaha! The state has debased and destroyed their money, but they are not upset about that. The state has grown itself to be, literally, half the entire economy, but they are not upset about that. The state has now installed so many taxes on so many things that they have driven up prices, but they are not upset about that. The state has indebted every citizen alive, and citizens who are not even born yet, so heavily that the debt cannot ever be paid back, but they are not upset about that. The state has encouraged that all the retirement accounts of everyone be put into the stock and bond markets, and they have lost money for years, but they are not upset about that. The state has gradually eaten away at every liberty, piece by piece by piece, but they are not upset about that. They have allowed the Constitution to be gutted, bit by bit by bit, but they are not upset about that. But maybe force them to move out of their houses, and they are, all of a sudden, upset about that! Hahahaha!

Tech Note: Google Earth

You've got to try this out. Download the software and fly over your house.

"A 3D interface to the planet

Google Earth – Explore, Search and Discover

Want to know more about a specific location? Dive right in -- Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips.

Fly from space to your neighborhood. Type in an address and zoom right in. "

Another Peek at Peak Oil

I was getting ready to write an article about how I consistently make the mistake of being too early in my projections ( I thought the peak in the Denver real estate market was 2000 ). Then I ran across this article.

Oil 'will hit $100 by winter' Worst-ever crisis looms, says analyst

Surging demand to keep prices high
Heather Stewart, economics correspondent
Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer

Oil prices could rocket to $100 within six months, plunging the world into an unprecedented fuel crisis, controversial Texan oil analyst Matt Simmons has warned.

After crude surged through $60 a barrel last week, nervous investors were pinning their hopes on a build-up in US oil-stocks to depress prices in the coming months.

But Simmons believes surging demand will keep prices bubbling well above $50. 'We could be at $100 by this winter. We have the biggest risk we have ever had of demand exceeding supply. We are now just about to face up to the biggest crisis we have ever had,' he said.

Please don't execute me for treason. It was only a little leak.

It's About Time

Some of us have been wondering when and if the Valerie Plame “outing” scandal was going to break. It looks like it is now beginning. Could Karl “Doughboy” Rove be the traitor, as we long suspected?

"Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source. Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, now claims that at least two sources have confirmed that the name is--top White House mastermind Karl Rove.

What we're going to go to now in the next stage, when Matt Cooper's e-mails, within Time Magazine, are handed over to the grand jury--the ultimate revelation, probably within the week of who his source is.

"I know I'm going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of...for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine's going to do with the grand jury."

'Tis to Laugh

Every once in a while something astounding is actually funny. Click on title to watch the video of a very talented dog.

Deja Vu

Why does all of this talk about training the Iraqi forces seem so familiar?

Those of us old enough to remember the War in Vietnam can’t forget the constant talk back then that all we had to do was train up the South Vietnamese and then we could leave. Hahaha! Take a look at the time period on the cover of this book by Brigadier General James Lawton Collins, Jr.

And while we are on the topic, didn’t the Iraqis have a 400,000 man army before the first Gulf War?

British "Deep Throat"?

Apparently, we have to wait for the British “Deep Throat” to reveal the documents that prove Bush lied his way into the Iraq War. Of course we knew that already but more and more proof keeps leaking out of the Brit’s teapot.


The Sunday Times - Britain
June 12, 2005

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’
by Michael Smith

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

“US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia,” the briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality “would arise virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation”.

The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

“It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.

There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.

The White House has declined to respond to a letter from 89 Democratic congressmen asking if it was true — as Dearlove told the July meeting — that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” in Washington.

The Downing Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it was raised at a joint Bush-Blair press conference, forcing the prime minister to insist that “the facts were not fixed in any shape or form at all”.

John Conyers, the Democratic congressman who drafted the letter to Bush, has now written to Dearlove asking him to say whether or not it was accurate that he believed the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. He also asked the former MI6 chief precisely when Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and whether it is true they agreed to “manufacture” the UN ultimatum in order to justify the war.

He and other Democratic congressmen plan to hold their own inquiry this Thursday with witnesses including Joe Wilson, the American former ambassador who went to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore for its nuclear weapons programme.

Bush Main Squeeze Provides 61% of Iraqi Suicide Bombers

"In a paper published in March, Reuven Paz, an Israeli expert on terrorism, analyzed the lists of jihadi dead. He found 154 Arabs killed over the previous six months in Iraq, 61 percent of them from Saudi Arabia, with Syrians, Iraqis and Kuwaitis together accounting for another 25 percent. He also found that 70 percent of the suicide bombers named by the Web sites were Saudi. In three cases, Paz found two brothers who carried out suicide attacks. Many of the bombers were married, well educated and in their late twenties, according to postings."

Wasn’t it weird how we knew who perpetuated 9/11 so soon after it happened? 15 of the 19 were Saudis and we flew the “good” Saudis out first? And Oh, I almost forgot, who financed George’s first oil company way back when? And that's just the tip of the oil berg.

Come on people, what is it going to take?

Dying Soldiers Shipped to Germany Not Counted

by Brian Harring, Domestic Intelligence Reporter

U.S. Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to German hospitals have not previously been counted. They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005.

The ongoing, underreporting of the dead in Iraq, is not accurate. The DoD is deliberately reducing the figures. A review of many foreign news sites show that actual deaths are far higher than the newly reduced ones. Iraqi civilian casualties are never reported but International Red Cross, Red Crescent and UN figures indicate that as of 1 January 2005, the numbers are just under 100,000.

Note: There is excellent reason to believe that the Department of Defense is deliberately not reporting a significant number of the dead in Iraq. We have received copies of manifests from the MATS that show far more bodies shipped into Dover AFP than are reported officially. The educated rumor is that the actual death toll is in excess of 7,000. Given the officially acknowledged number of over 15,000 seriously wounded, this elevated death toll is far more realistic than the current 1,400+ now being officially published. When our research is complete, and watertight, we will publish the results along with the sources.

In addition to the evident falsification of the death rolls, at least 5,500 American military personnel have deserted, most in Ireland but more have escaped to Canada and other European countries, none of whom are inclined to cooperate with vengeful American authorities. (See TBR News of 18 February for full coverage on the mass desertions)

This means that of the 158,000 U.S. military shipped to Iraq, 26,000 either deserted, were killed or seriously wounded. The DoD lists currently being very quietly circulated indicate almost 9,000 dead, over 16,000 seriously wounded and a large number of suicides, forced hospitalization for ongoing drug usage and sales, murder of Iraqi civilians and fellow soldiers , rapes, courts martial and so on – Brian Harring

War Criminals

So, what does it mean? It means that our president and all of his administration are war criminals. It's as simple as that. They lied to the American people, have killed and injured and traumatized thousands of American men and women doing their patriotic duty, killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians, destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and poisoned its environment, squandered billions and billions of our tax dollars, made a mockery of American integrity in the world, changed the course of history, tortured Iraqi prisoners, and bound us intractably to an insane situation that they have no idea how to fix because they had no plan, but greed and empire, in the first place.

What does it mean? It means that everyone in this administration should be impeached. It means that our Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and our Congressmen Tom Allen and Mike Michaud should call for immediate impeachment. They were lied to by their president, voted for war, and are thus complicit in the multiply betrayals of the American people unless they stand up now for the truth.

Pot Calls on Kettle

SINGAPORE, Saturday, June 4 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in an unusually blunt public critique of China, said Saturday that Beijing's military spending threatened the delicate security balance in Asia and called for an emphasis instead on political freedom and open markets.

What I Think Is Going To Happen

Predicting the future is a fool’s game, and I have often been proven to be a fool, so I feel qualified to give it a whirl.

1. The price of gasoline is going to continue going up, with occasional gaps up and slower declines from time to time. As $3 and then $4 per gallon is approached, consumption will show a small but increasing decline. Conservation will catch on.

2. Commerce will contract during this decline as the cost of doing business for all oil driven enterprises, e.g. farming, transportation and plastics, increases and more companies go under.

3. Increased joblessness, homelessness, hopelessness, suicide rate, and crime, all as natural consequences of the noose tightening on the necks of the workers, with stagnant wage increases, and in many cases, wage decreases, as illegal aliens continue to flood into the US.

4. The price of gold will continue to try to go up, but will be held back by bullion banks and their cohorts at all nations’ central banks. To say that the gold market is rigged is to understate the case. Of course it’s rigged, that’s why they call it the central bank.

5. Eventually these banks will be unable to offset the rising demand. Gold will gap up in an eye-popping fashion. Silver will do the same, and eventually outpace gold in terms of percentage gain. The silver demand growth is much greater than that of gold and will continue to grow.

6. Electrical brown-outs and then rolling blackouts will increase, and become the norm in the US.

7. Housing prices will continue their slow slide down, foreclosures will jump (46% of mortgage holders have some form of Adjustable Rate Mortgage), and homes will be boarded up.

8. Eventually Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, and the Federal Pension Insurance Program will go under. Huge accounting “frauds” will be unearthed.

9. An event will occur which will be the tipping point of a major currency, financial and stock market crash; NASDAQ 800, DOW 4000. Even the hyper-hedgefunds will stop buying Treasuries.

10. This event will probably involve the global oil distribution network. Gasoline will gap up to $8 to $10 per gallon.

11. As petrochemical fertilizer becomes too expensive to use, The Great American Breadbasket will return to its original condition as The Great American Desert.

12. Global delivery of goods to the fat American consumer will cease. Wal-Mart will collapse as Chinese goods become very expensive, especially when the remimbi is un-pegged from the dollar. (Are the Chinese waiting to unpeg as the coup de gras to the crashing dollar?

13. The dollar decline will have continued throughout this unfolding, and inflation will have jumped up at some point, prompting the Fed to jump interest rates to 1980’s levels, and higher.
World-wide recession, and then depression, will set in.

14. Today’s third-world countries will suffer less shock, as they are less dependent upon oil.

15. Regional wars will continue and increase.

16. The “Only Superpower in the World” will be stretched so thin it will collapse, as long supply lines become untenable. Long before this, however, the draft will have been reinstated and the people will take to the streets.

17. As food disappears from the grocery store shelves, riots break out in the cities, police attempt but are unable to quell, and there is no National Guard to call in as they are all abroad fighting the Oil Wars.

18. People begin to flee the cities as the store of resources is used up.

19. Those currently living the furthest from the high-rise high-tech centers will fare the best. Communities currently off the grid will thrive.

20. The human and domestic animal die-off will begin. Corporate enterprise will cease.

21. High level organization will cease and power will descend to the tribal level. Warlords with gangs will roam freely.

22. Those currently living with the land and off the grid will have to organize to protect their holdings. Trespassers will be shot.

23. Those with survival skills will survive. Self-sufficiency will be key.

24. All solar panels will wear out.

25. Centralized electricity generation and distribution will cease.

26. Globalization will cease.

27. The 100-year Fossil Fuel Frenzy will come to an end.

28. Global warming will continue, sea levels will rise up to 19 feet, but the natural balance will out. This will take hundreds of years, but life on earth will continue and thrive.

29. Off the grid will be the norm, as the grid will devolve.

30. Humans who band together in tribes will rediscover their humanity. The extended family will form the basis for the tribes.

31. All knowledge will not be lost, and we will not all live in caves.

32. Barter and trade will be the standard, but gold and silver money will still be currency. US dollars will be tinder.

33. Just as all other civilizations have failed, so will ours. What evolves to replace it will be interesting, but the Fossil Fuel Frenzy civilization was a one-off phenomenon, and will not reoccur.

34. As 90% of the humans die, peace and tranquility will eventual come to the planet. The human cancer with its uncontrolled growth will be defeated. Humans will again be part of nature. Tribal war will become ceremonial, and the coup stick will be popular.

34. It's all good...except for one thing. Depleted uranium. The entire globe will suffer "gulf war syndrome" due to the 2000 tons of atomized uranium placed in the atmosphere by the US during this war.

35. Cancer rates will climb to 50% by 2020.

36. Most babies born will die from their deformities. Those that do not may have evolved immunity.

We can only hope.

Note: These are not my original ideas. Original sources are contained in past blogs.

New Format

As you can see, I've changed the format of this blog. More space for text. Hope you like it.

Even the Mainstream Press is Starting to Get It

Experts: Petroleum May Be Nearing a Peak

By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer
5-28-2005

Could the petroleum joyride — cheap, abundant oil that has sent the global economy whizzing along with the pedal to the metal and the AC blasting for decades — be coming to an end? Some observers of the oil industry think so. They predict that this year, maybe next — almost certainly by the end of the decade — the world's oil production, having grown exuberantly for more than a century, will peak and begin to decline.

And then it really will be all downhill. The price of oil will increase drastically. Major oil-consuming countries will experience crippling inflation, unemployment and economic instability. Princeton University geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes predicts "a permanent state of oil shortage."
According to these experts, it will take a decade or more before conservation measures and new technologies can bridge the gap between supply and demand, and even then the situation will be touch and go.

None of this will affect vacation plans this summer — Americans can expect another season of beach weekends and road trips to Graceland relatively unimpeded by the cost of getting there. Though gas prices are up, they are expected to remain below $2.50 a gallon. Accounting for inflation, that's pretty comparable to what motorists paid for most of the 20th century; it only feels expensive because gasoline was unusually cheap between 1986 and 2003.

And there are many who doubt the doomsday scenario will ever come true. Most oil industry analysts think production will continue growing for at least another 30 years. By then, substitute energy sources will be available to ease the transition into a post-petroleum age.

"This is just silly," said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research in Winchester, Mass. "It's not like industrial civilization is going to come crashing down."

Where you stand on "peak oil," as parties to the debate call it, depends on which forces you consider dominant in controlling the oil markets. People who consider economic forces most important believe that prices are high right now mostly because of increased demand from China and other rapidly growing economies. But eventually, high prices should encourage consumers to use less and producers to pump more.

But Deffeyes and many other geologists counter that when it comes to oil, Mother Nature trumps Adam Smith. The way they see it, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway and other major producers are already pumping as fast as they can. The only way to increase production capacity is to discover more oil. Yet with a few exceptions, there just isn't much left out there to be discovered.

"The economists all think that if you show up at the cashier's cage with enough currency, God will put more oil in ground," Deffeyes said.

There will be warning signs before global oil production peaks, the bearers of bad news contend. Prices will rise dramatically and become increasingly volatile. With little or no excess production capacity, minor supply disruptions — political instability in Venezuela, hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico or labor unrest in Nigeria, for example — will send the oil markets into a tizzy. So will periodic admissions by oil companies and petroleum-rich nations that they have been overestimating their reserves.

Oil producers will grow flush with cash. And because the price of oil ultimately affects the cost of just about everything else in the economy, inflation will rear its ugly head.

Anybody who has been paying close attention to the news lately may feel a bit queasy at this stage. Could $5-a-gallon gas be right around the corner?

"The world has never seen anything like this before and so we just really don't know," said Robert L. Hirsch, an energy analyst at Science Applications International Corp., a Santa Monica, Calif., consulting firm. Still, he added, "there's a number of really competent professionals that are very pessimistic."

The pessimism stems from a legendary episode in the history of petroleum geology. Back in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970.
His superiors at Shell Oil were aghast. They even tried to persuade Hubbert not to speak publicly about his work. His peers, accustomed to decades of making impressive oil discoveries, were skeptical.

But Hubbert was right. U.S. oil production did peak in 1970, and it has declined steadily ever since. Even impressive discoveries such as Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, with 13 billion barrels in recoverable reserves, haven't been able to reverse that trend.

Hubbert started his analysis by gathering statistics on how much oil had been discovered and produced in the Lower 48 states, both onshore and off, between 1901 and 1956 (Alaska was still terra incognita to petroleum geologists 50 years ago). His data showed that the country's oil reserves had increased rapidly from 1901 until the 1930s, then more slowly after that.

When Hubbert graphed that pattern it looked very much like America's oil supply was about to peak. Soon, it appeared, America's petroleum reserves would reach an all-time maximum. And then they would begin to shrink as the oil companies extracted crude from the ground faster than geologists could find it.

That made sense. Hubbert knew some oil fields, especially the big ones, were easier to find than others. Those big finds would come first, and then the pace of discovery would decline as the remaining pool of oil resided in progressively smaller and more elusive deposits.

The production figures followed a similar pattern, but it looked like they would peak a few years later than reserves.

That made sense too. After all, oil can't be pumped out of the ground the instant it is discovered. Lease agreements have to be negotiated, wells drilled, pipelines built; the development process can take years.

When Hubbert extended the production curve into the future it looked like it would peak around 1970. Every year after that, America would pump less oil than it had the year before.
If that prognostication wasn't daring enough, Hubbert had yet another mathematical trick up his sleeve. Assuming that the reserves decline was going to be a mirror image of the rise, geologists would have found exactly half of the oil in the Lower 48 when the curve peaked. Doubling that number gave Hubbert the grand total of all recoverable oil under the continental United States: 170 billion barrels.

At first, critics objected to Hubbert's analysis, arguing that technological improvements in exploration and recovery would increase the amount of available oil.

They did, but not enough to extend production beyond the limits Hubbert had projected. Even if you throw in the unexpected discovery of oil in Alaska, America's petroleum production history has proceeded almost exactly as Hubbert predicted it would.

Critics claim that Hubbert simply got lucky.

"When it pretty much worked," Lynch said, "he decided, aha, it has to be a bell curve."
But many experts see no reason global oil production has to peak at all. It could plateau and then gradually fall as the economy converts to other forms of energy.

"Even in 30 to 40 years there's still going to be huge amounts of oil in the Middle East," said Daniel Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis.

A few years ago, geologists began applying Hubbert's methods to the entire world's oil production. Their analyses indicated that global oil production would peak some time during the first decade of the 21st century.

Deffeyes thinks the peak will be in late 2005 or early 2006. Houston investment banker Matthew Simmons puts it at 2007 to 2009. California Institute of Technology physicist David Goodstein, whose book "The End of Oil" was published last year, predicts it will arrive before 2010.

The exact date doesn't really matter, said Hirsch, because he believes it's already too late. In an analysis he did for the U.S. Department of Energy in February, Hirsch concluded that it will take more than a decade for the U.S. economy to adapt to declining oil production.

"You've got to do really big things in order to dent the problem. And if you're on the backside of the supply curve you're chasing the train after it's already left the station," he said.

For example, the median lifetime of an American automobile is 17 years. That means even if the government immediately mandated a drastic increase in fuel efficiency standards, the conservation benefits wouldn't fully take effect for almost two decades.

And though conservation would certainly be necessary in a crisis, it wouldn't be enough. Fully mitigating the sting of decreasing oil supplies would require developing alternate sources of energy — and not the kind that politicians and environmentalists wax rhapsodic about when they promise pollution-free hydrogen cars and too-cheap-to-meter solar power.

If oil supplies really do decline in the next few decades, America's energy survival will hinge on the last century's technology, not the next one's. Hirsch's report concludes that compensating for a long-term oil shortfall would require building a massive infrastructure to convert coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels into combustible liquids.

Proponents of coal liquefaction, which creates synthetic oil by heating coal in the presence of hydrogen gas, refer to the process as "clean coal" technology. It is clean, but only to the extent that the synthetic oil it produces burns cleaner than raw coal. Synthetic oil still produces carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse warming gas, during both production and combustion (though in some scenarios some of that pollution could be kept out of the atmosphere). And the coal that goes into the liquefaction process still has to be mined, which means tailing piles, acid runoff and other toxic ills.

And then there's the fact that nobody wants a "clean coal" plant in the backyard. Shifting to new forms of energy will require building new refineries, pipelines, transportation terminals and other infrastructure at a time when virtually every new project faces intense local opposition.
Energy analysts say coal liquefaction can produce synthetic oil at a cost of $32 a barrel, well below the $50 range where oil has been trading for the past year or so. But before they invest billions of dollars in coal liquefaction, investors want to be sure that oil prices will remain high.
Investors are similarly wary about tar sands and heavy oil deposits in Canada and Venezuela. Though they are too gooey to be pumped from the ground like conventional oil, engineers have developed ways of liquefying the deposits with injections of hot water and other means. Already, about 8 percent of Canada's oil production comes from tar sands.

Unfortunately, it costs energy to recover energy from tar sands. Most Canadian operations use natural gas to heat water for oil recovery; and like oil, natural gas has gotten dramatically more expensive in the past few years.

"The reality is, this thing is extremely complicated," Hirsch said. "My honest view is that anybody who tells you that they have a clear picture probably doesn't understand the problem."

Skype Now

If you haven’t heard, Skype is the latest internet telephone which enables you to make long-distance phone calls for free to other Skypers, and for a competitive rate, to non-Skypers with land or cell phones. You’ll need a microphone attached to your computer. A headset mic with earphone works well. Make sure its plugged into the correct place.

1. Go to Skype.com and download the free program to match your operating system, e.g. Windows.
2. Install and test as directed.
3. Call me at geraldtrumbule.

Millions have signed up and you should too.

In Memoriam

Dedicated to our thousands who were "methodically deceived" and to those millions that they killed.

"But during the last half century -- when, for days or months or many years, U.S. troops and planes assaulted the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq again -- the rationales from the White House were always based on major falsehoods, avidly promoted by the U.S. mass media. In the light of real history, the U.S. soldiers who are honored each Memorial Day were pawns of methodical deception. Media spin and the edicts of authorities induced them to kill "enemy" combatants and civilians, for whom Pentagon buglers have never played a single mournful note."

Fossil Fuel Frenzy

Continuing Cracks - Part 11

Since I started this blog I've been documenting the "Continuing Cracks" in the US dollar domination of global finances. The diminishing sale of our Treasuries to Japan and China (and now Norway) and the hint of trouble in the hedge funds (which have gone exponential). This article ties them together and reveals Federal Fudging of the Data (FFD).

"This is news. This is deadly serious and has extremely dire implications for each and every American citizen – no – how about each and every person in the industrialized Western World? Remember, folks, the American Dollar currently still enjoys global reserve currency status. This is a privilege – not a god given right. As such, the dollar’s fate is of grave and utmost concern to many beyond US borders.

I do not understand how a “press” that claims to be the freest in the world can remain stone silent on this issue. Don’t you think we all deserve better? Does anyone really believe that ignoring this issue and failing to report it altogether will alter the stark, dark and disturbing reality outlined in the Treasury’s own published numbers?

Better put your mitts on folks – and get in the game. In absence of an explanation to the contrary, it sure looks like somebody’s monetizing debt and printing money – and lots of it. The silence on the part of officialdom on this issue is truly deafening. Remember folks, the shenanigans outlined above are all brought to us by the same swashbuckling clowns who claim the economy is doing fine, there are lots of jobs, are adamant that the gold market is not rigged and oh, yes, they perpetually remind us that inflation is a non issue too. What a mess."

(Click on title for complete article.)

Smoking Gun Found - Left Lying on Ground

(from www.rebelgraphics.org)

and from Molly Ivins, by way of www.TomDispatch.com

Published on Wednesday, May 11, 2005 by Working for Change

They Lied to Us

Memo proves leadership knew Saddam was not a threat

by Molly Ivins

Meanwhile, back in Iraq. I was going to leave out of this column everything about how we got into Iraq, or whether it was wise, and or whether the infamous "they" knowingly lied to us. (Although I did plan to point out I would be nobly refraining from poking at that pus-riddled question.)

Since I believe one of our greatest strengths as Americans is shrewd practicality, I thought it was time we moved past the now unhelpful, "How did we get into his mess?" to the more utilitarian, "What the hell do we do now?"

However, I cannot let this astounding Downing Street memo go unmentioned.
(Click title to continue)

Another One Bites the Dust

America's drug plan collapses in chaos
By Hugh O'Shaughnessy
15 May 2005

"Washington's "war on drugs" in Colombia is collapsing in chaos and corruption, and the drug producers are winning. The so-called Plan Colombia, which has cost the US more than $3bn (£1.6bn) in the past five years, is being abandoned, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has announced.

Last year, the hugely expensive effort to poison coca bushes - whose leaves are the source of cocaine - by aerial spraying ended in failure. More bushes were flourishing in January this year than in January 2004."

Attack on Iran Coming in June

To date this is the third reference (see archives) I have found that Bush intends to bomb Iran in June. We shall see. Click on title above for full article.

"Buried down in today’s New York Times report on President Bush reaffirming his unqualified support for John Bolton as U.N. Ambassador is the reason why almost all of you are ready to vote for his confirmation.

“Republicans are hoping to shame Democrats into a quick vote on Mr. Bolton. They argue that he needs to be in place by June so that the United States will have the latitude it needs to press its concerns about Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program before the Security Council.”

Why the big rush? My reliable sources tell me it is because there is a timetable that makes it urgent for Bolton to be ready for action in June in order to cripple the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as part of the plan to bomb the Iranian nuclear-power plant at Bushehr. That’s because Bushehr, under construction with Russian supervision, will soon be ready to receive the Russian fissionable material enabling it to produce power. In 1981, remember Republican Senators, Israel bombed the Osiraq nuclear power plant near Baghdad just before it was to be fueled by its French contractors. Once fueled, bombing is out of the question because of the radiation that would be emitted, with clouds traveling who knows where."

Continuing Cracks

Watch for similar events on this side of the pond.


City Hedge Funds Head for Domino Collapse
Peter Koenig and Louise Armitstead
The Times, LondonSunday, May 15, 2005

Bad investments by some of the biggest hedge funds in London have triggered unprecedented losses, record demands for money back, and talk of a death spiral weighing heavily on stocks and bonds. GLG, a hedge fund started in 1995 by a group of former Goldman Sachs bankers, has in recent weeks had demands for more than $500m(£270m) from investors wanting to pull out of its $4 billionmarket-neutral fund.

The predicament of GLG, the biggest group in Europe, with $13 billion under management, highlights the stress being felt at many hedge funds in Europe and America after four months of deteriorating results. Prime brokers and the credit departments in investment banks have been calling clients to check their capital strengths as rumours of a big hedge-fund blow-out grip the industry.

London-based Cheyne is thought to be down by at least 10% in its credit fund after the downgrading of debt at General Motors and Ford. Ferox, another of London's most successful funds, isthought to be down nearly 20%. Bailey Coates, Polygon, Rubicon, Vega, Moore Capital, and Brevan Howard are all nursing heavy losses of about 5% each in April.

Bailey Coates, whose losses reported in The Sunday Times three weeks ago first alerted the wider market to the industry crisis, has had yet more redemption calls. "What you're seeing is like a run on the bank," said Narayan Naik,director of hedge-fund studies at the London Business School. "Selling forces more selling and there's a cascade effect."

You've Got to Laugh Once in a While

Click the title above for some of the best internet videos I've seen in a while. Most are funny but some (Bunker Buster) are quite sobering.

So This is the Culture of Life

I spend considerable time trying to educate myself in the big-picture issues. About a month ago, I saw President Bush on TV and he looked sick, or badly hung over. I wondered if anybody else noticed, so I created a Google Alert on the phrase “is Bush sick”. Every day I’ve been getting at least 6 articles containing Bush and sick, and the variety has been sometimes amusing and sometimes sickening.

Today’s batch brought a resource so devastating I just had to pass it on to you. Here I present excerpts from 3 of the reports. Dick Chaney is, apparently, the most evil person ever, and he and his have unleashed enough Depleted Uranium (DU) to kill off all life on the planet. By 2020 the cancer rate will be 50%.

Various quotes from Iconoclast-Texas.com:

"Yeah, the concentration of the depleted uranium particles in the atmosphere all around the globe is increasing. There are indications that the U.S. will go in June and bomb the heck out of Iran. We’re monitoring the U.S. Army ammunition factories. They have very large orders for those huge bunker buster bombs that have 5,000 lbs. of DU in the warhead."

"The soldiers from Gulf War I in a group of 67 soldiers who came back, they had DU in their equipment, in their clothes, in their bodies, in their semen, and they had normal babies before they went over there to war. They came back, and the VA did a study. Of 251 Gulf War I veterans in Mississippi, in 67 percent of them, their babies born after the war were deemed to have severe birth defects. They had brains missing, arms and legs missing, organs missing. They were born without eyes. They had horrible blood diseases. It’s horrific."

"If they were in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, they’re coming home with rectal cancer from sitting on ammunition boxes. The young women are reporting terrible problems with endometriosis. That’s the lining of the uterus malfunctioning, and they just bleed and bleed and bleed. Some of them have uterine cancer — 18 and 19 and 20 year olds. The Army will not even diagnose it. They send them back to the battlefields. They won’t treat them or diagnose them. A group of 20 soldiers pushed from Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003 in all the fighting. Eight of those 20 soldiers have malignancies."

"The simple thing is, you take tons and tons of solid radioactive waste, and you spread it all over the world, both here in the states and overseas, in combat situations and non-combat situations, do it into the ocean, then refuse to clean it up and provide the medical care. It’s that easy."

"What we have is deliberate use of solid radioactive materials all over the place and the deliberate refusal to provide the medical care that’s mandated by Army orders and regulations, Department of Defense directives, and a simple refusal to clean up all the environmental contamination that must be done by the direct Army regulation. It’s that easy. There’s no accountability. Anybody that speaks up becomes persona non grata and the attacks just come flying your way beyond comprehension."

Downwinders Be Damned

"Just as the Bush administration contemplates ordering up a new generation of nuclear weapons, which may in turn spark a new round of nuclear testing in the high deserts of Nevada, the Center for Disease Control, a federal outpost in Atlanta charged with supervising the nation's physical well-being, pulled the plug on a long-term study into the dire health consequences from nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s on people living in the American southwest." (click title to continue)

Peak Oil Revisited

This from the weekend version of The Daily Reckoning, a free daily newsletter which I highly recommend.

Received this today from our friend Bob Gibbs in Cleveland. Bob has his own company and sells transformers and switch gear to power companies and others who operate their own power plants. I think he knows what he's talking about.

Nuclear Power is having a rebirth. The newer design does away with these cooling tower types of installation. It is called a PBMR (pebble bed modular reactor) which is smaller and cheaper, takes about 24 months to build and lasts about 40 years. They are much safer. Inside a PBMR, there is a bed of high temperature silicon graphite balls each about the size of a billiard ball. About 70 % of the balls have flecks of uranium. When they interact, the bed of graphite balls gets hot. The gas carries the heat to a turbine. If the core hits peak temperature of about 1600 deg. C, it starts to cool itself down automatically. There is no uncontained chain reaction to cause a meltdown as in the existing type of plants. Also they are built to store their own waste in the basement with storage space for forty years of operation. Of course, the Sierra Club and others will still find fault with this.

In the next 15 years, China will need to generate at least six times what it already generates or at least two of these nuclear reactors per year. India has the same expected growth. You hear a lot about the wind power being so clean, etc., but it is small potatoes. Four of these nuclear reactors could generate more than all of the existing wind power turbines in California and use very little real estate to do so.

Surprisingly enough, this rebirth of nuclear does not mean the demise of coal because there also is new coal technology. The world has about a 300-year coal supply. China now generates about 70% of their power with coal. Coal presents two problems: Transportation and dirty burning. Both of these are being solved by liquefying coal for cleaner burning and it will be a lot easier for the Chinese to get coal via a pipeline from the north of China to where the factories are in southern China. This technology is like turning coal into oil.

Uranium has been rising in costs because of the rebirth of nuclear. It is now about $20/lb. At that price, relative present fuel costs are:

Coal - $1.25 per million BTU
Natural Gas - $3.5 per million BTU
Oil - $6.00 per million BTU
Uranium - $0.055 per million BTU

Let's assume that Uranium increases to 50 times the current price as demand picks up again. The new PBMR nuclear plants would provide energy at the equivalent to buying gasoline at 1/2 cent per gallon.

Most of the world's untapped coal reserves are in the U.S., northern China, Australia and Canada.

The U.S., Canada and Australia have the greatest part of the world's uranium.

The best news of all is that there is one place in the world that does not have much of these reserves and that is the Middle East. Wouldn't it be nice to be around when we don't need them anymore and they have to fend for themselves.

Now We're Getting Somewhere

ITHACA, New York (AP) -- Not just anybody can say he has a slime-mold beetle named in his honor. But George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld can.

Entomologists Quentin Wheeler and Kelly B. Miller, who recently had the task of naming 65 newly discovered species of slime-mold beetles, named three species after the president, vice president and defense secretary.

Votes for Food

A lady at the polls yesterday (in Denver) expressed her dismay that so few citizens were voting. “Why in Iraq, 70% of the people turned out.” she said. I guess she hadn’t seen this report.

February 1, 2005

Will Vote for Food?
by Dahr Jamail

BAGHDAD - Voting in Baghdad was linked with receipt of food rations, several voters said after the Sunday poll.

Many Iraqis said Monday that their names were marked on a list provided by the government agency that provides monthly food rations before they were allowed to vote.

"I went to the voting center and gave my name and district where I live to a man," said Wassif Hamsa, a 32-year-old journalist who lives in the predominantly Shia area Janila in Baghdad.

"This man then sent me to the person who distributed my monthly food ration."
Mohammed Ra'ad, an engineering student who lives in the Baya'a district of the capital city, reported a similar experience.

Ra'ad, 23, said he saw the man who distributed monthly food rations in his district at his polling station. "The food dealer, who I know personally of course, took my name and those of my family who were voting," he said. "Only then did I get my ballot and was allowed to vote."

"Two of the food dealers I know told me personally that our food rations would be withheld if we did not vote," said Saeed Jodhet, a 21-year-old engineering student who voted in the Hay al-Jihad district of Baghdad.

There has been no official indication that Iraqis who did not vote would not receive their monthly food rations.

Many Iraqis had expressed fears before the election that their monthly food rations would be cut if they did not vote. They said they had to sign voter registration forms in order to pick up their food supplies.

Your Next New Car

car

Easy Access to Blogs

If you have a few bloggers that you read regularly, you can add them to your browser, where you can easily check to see if they have added any new articles. Find the “add content” button on your browser and follow the easy steps. You will need to know the “RSS feed” for a particular blog. For example, to add this blog to your browser you will need to type in www.astoundingnews.blogspot.com/atom.xml. The “atom.xml” part might be different for specific blogs, but you can usually find this info on the blog itself. Good luck!